Flow and change: The new Zen in network management?

Is network management cool again?; Will anything go away in network management?; and other questions answered by Interop panel

Industry analysis by Beth Schultz, plus the latest news headlines.

From a network/IT management and security perspective, this month's Interop had a lot to offer. Innovations in analytics, application discovery, the peaceful sense that managing VoIP has settled in as a major requirement without looking backwards over your shoulder to see if someone was still smirking, and the slow gathering storm around managing wireless - were just a few signs of the time.

This year I was also on multiple panels and moderated one - “Is Network Management Cool Again?” I had the pleasure of being on the panel with representatives from CA, Cisco, IBM and the Burton Group. Here are a few of the topics and answers as they transpired during the panel.

* Is Network Management Cool Again? We had four yes’s (myself included) and one humorous observation that with so many Hawaiian shirts in the audience we still had a ways to go. The variants here included those of us - from CA and myself - who felt it never had been anything but cool, just reshaped itself to address new priorities over the years. For instance, network management was defined almost unanimously in the beginning of the panel as a system for enabling and monitoring the effective delivery of (application) services vs. purely the management of network devices. One respondent from IBM, speculated that network management might never have been “cool” but that it was now because application performance had become so network-dependent.

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From a network/IT management and security perspective, this month's Interop had a lot to offer. Innovations in analytics, application discovery, the peaceful sense that managing VoIP has settled in as a major requirement without looking backwards over your shoulder to see if someone was still smirking, and the slow gathering storm around managing wireless - were just a few signs of the time.

This year I was also on multiple panels and moderated one - “Is Network Management Cool Again?” I had the pleasure of being on the panel with representatives from CA, Cisco, IBM and the Burton Group. Here are a few of the topics and answers as they transpired during the panel.

* Is Network Management Cool Again? We had four yes’s (myself included) and one humorous observation that with so many Hawaiian shirts in the audience we still had a ways to go. The variants here included those of us - from CA and myself - who felt it never had been anything but cool, just reshaped itself to address new priorities over the years. For instance, network management was defined almost unanimously in the beginning of the panel as a system for enabling and monitoring the effective delivery of (application) services vs. purely the management of network devices. One respondent from IBM, speculated that network management might never have been “cool” but that it was now because application performance had become so network-dependent.

* Will anything go away in network management? The rough consensus was the basic niche monitoring tools, particularly those that depend on high-latency pings - will generally fade away. But in our market, almost nothing disappears, for better and mostly for worse, investments in the management technology “fossil record” often spread over multiple decades within the same IT organization.

* What are the key challenges facing network managers looking ahead? Managing converging services, and managing Web Services topped the list of challenges. There are lots of reasons why these present challenges, from ensuring QoS, to sheer complexity, to the peer-to-peer, or (in the case of Web Services) the machine-to-machine nature of the communication. As applications move from rigid infrastructures towards more fluid infrastructures, a world without permanence is emerging. And in this brave new world, real-time requirements for monitoring will become acute to a degree unprecedented in the past.

* What are the solutions? Here the answers were surprisingly consistent - with an emphasis on flow-based management systems and managing change. Analytics was brought up, as well. Flow - whether packet-based or paired flows as in NetFlow, or protocol-based - enables real-time contextual monitoring, which is why it was cited. I’ve written about this repeatedly - EMA views this category as a polymorphic technology supporting multiple markets from performance to security to chargeback accounting. Change management was another core requirement - perhaps the single most dominant area of attention in the industry today and in the foreseeable future - and for good reason. Most effective IT organizations invest in process controls to take charge of the otherwise amorphous phenomenon of ad hoc patches understood by no one but weekend heroes. Capturing and validating the impacts of change are also key.

Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can email her or find her here.